Ask HN: Do you still code in BASIC?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774286

by yori • 7 years ago

49 121 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Do you still write code in BASIC? If yes, which BASIC compiler or interpreter do you use?

ocdtrekkie• 7 years ago

Does Visual Basic .NET count? Because I still code in that with Visual Studio 2019.

interlocutor• 7 years ago

VB was one of the most popular languages in the 90's and into early 2000's. How did it fall out of favor? Was it because of Microsoft forcing VB into "just another skin" over .NET, i.e., a variant of C# that doesn't have curly braces?

vb6sp63• 7 years ago

People are elitists and vb.net was seen as inferior to "real programmers who use c"

dole2• 7 years ago

Many VB developers found C# easier to transition to than VB.Net; one reason is that some of VB.Net's syntax and parameter orders changed and became unintuitive when bouncing between the old and new.

Ididntdothis• 7 years ago

VB.NET has superficial similarity with VBA and VB6 but it’s a completely different beast. You can’t just port old VB code to VB.NET so to me and probably a lot of other devs it didn’t make much sense to use VB.NET.

StillBored• 7 years ago

I did some VB programming in the mid 1990's, looked at vb.net shortly after it came out and discovered that much of what made VB "good" had been lost. The easy learning curve, and the ability to create useful things in timeframes measured in a couple hours or less all seemed to be replaced with the traditional programming tool paradigms.

The lack of a reasonable porting tool and the fact that it didn't really have any advantages over C# in .net land, it made sense for most people to jump to C# instead of VB.net.

MS had to know this was going to happen. They left the door open for someone to actually create something to fill the VB niche, but all the focus on web technologies has meant that nothing really stepped up.

Scuds• 7 years ago

There's "Fall out of favor within MS Developer Division, who has to build the future" and "Fall out of favor with line of business app developers."

VB6 (runtime and language) was great for its time but it's an evolutionary dead end.

Was it because of Microsoft forcing VB into "just another skin" over .NET, i.e., a variant of C# that doesn't have curly braces? That's how it looks on the surface, but it's compiled, not interpreted, has an actual type system, threads, a proper standard library.

There's also the need to gather the C++ Win32/MFC crowd and the VB6 crowd into a single tent.

kerng5• 7 years ago

VB was basically terminated by Microsoft in favor of .net.

It would have been (maybe still would be) amazing to see what the community would pull off with VB6 if Microsoft would open source it.

VB6 IDE was so far ahead of it's time, even today (20+ years later) most languages don't have anything that comes close to what Microsoft had done there in the 90s.

It would probabaly the perfect language for UI development and data analysis (think VBNotebooks), possibly ML.

tabtab2• 7 years ago

The "original" VB fell out of favor because the architecture didn't scale well. It was great for smaller projects, but shops that wanted bigger apps or stronger abstractions to avoid reinventing the wheel had an easier time with Delphi and C++ with libraries.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing because it's hard to make both small projects and big projects happy at the same time. But MS decided to focus on "enterprise" because the profit margins are usually bigger there. Thus, they mostly abandoned the original VB.

This sent a shock-wave through the industry because their code base couldn't go anywhere. It did give a boost to FOSS, because it's less likely that a heavily used FOSS product will be outright abandoned.

smacktoward3• 7 years ago

I was a VB developer when that all went down. VB didn't fall out of favor, Microsoft killed it.

When .NET came along MS replaced "classic" VB with VB.NET, which was syntactically just different enough from classic VB to make moving to it a big project.

Worse, VB.NET wasn't backwards-compatible with classic VB, so you couldn't just bring your old projects into the new environment; you had to rewrite them from the ground up in the new syntax.

Worse still, to encourage VB devs to move to VB.NET, Microsoft stopped selling licenses for classic VB. Not "warned developers they would stop selling licenses in five years" or the like, mind. They just stopped. If you wanted to buy a license for VB, it was VB.NET or nothing. Which, when you considered that VB.NET wouldn't run all your old code, was kind of terrifying.

All of which amounted to dropping a nuclear bomb on the VB community, as it pushed everyone into doing what someone (I think Joel Spolsky) once called "the dreaded market survey." In other words, if you're going to have to learn a whole new language in a hurry anyway, why not consider all the new languages available to you?

So while a few classic VB devs did move to VB.NET, most ended up landing elsewhere; some to C#, some to web application platforms like ColdFusion, some to open-source languages like Perl, etc. (I went to Perl, which led me to PHP, which led me to Python.) What had been one of the world's largest programming communities was scattered to the four winds overnight.

gregjor• 7 years ago

Yes, but it’s called Javascript now.

omarhaneef2• 7 years ago

Javascript because it is everywhere, or Python because it is so simple?

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

Me too, but javascript is so limited compared to the old 'terrible' BASIC. Stand-alone apps and full disk-I/O are sadly missing. Wish there was a way to do that.

omarhaneef2• 7 years ago

Only if something really can't be done in excel natively -- and that gets more rare every year.

Jamwinner• 7 years ago

I ocassionaly use it, but mostly only for toy projects. All the basic code I write is pretty interpreter agnostic after moving from applebasic to msbasic in the 90s. It comes down to what is available on whatever platform I am playing with now.

pubby• 7 years ago

Nope!

sixothree4• 7 years ago

In one of our solutions (about 75+ projects) we have a single VB.net project with just a few classes. Nobody has bothered to port it over because it never needed changes. So it sits there doing its thing. The funny thing is that it was converted from C# code, which was promptly lost, some ten years ago because we thought it would be easier for the dev unfamiliar with C#.

On a personal note, I collect vintage computers. I have too many and stopped counting at 50. So I do use BASIC in that sense.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

Is your collection online somewhere?

sixothree4• 7 years ago

No. I really need to catalog it better since it is such a fun collection. It ranges from 8 bits (Apple IIs, TRS-80s, Commodore PETs) to Sun SparcStations.

kgwxd• 7 years ago

Just on the Commander X16. The built-in interpreter is 100% backwards-compatible with the VIC-20 and C64.

sixothree4• 7 years ago

CC65 targets it, which is fun. I want a physical one when they are released.

ninjis• 7 years ago

Yes, a derivative called UniBasic (which is itself a derivative of Pick BASIC) but the system it's used with provides an additional set of extensions to the language. UniBasic + extensions results in a language referred to as Envision.

blessmyheart• 7 years ago

Oh man, UniBasic and DataBasic. I did that for 20 years until it fell out of favor here. I really miss it.

ph33t• 7 years ago

Yes. PowerBasic. Since the original developer has passed on (Bob Zale), I don't use it for new coding. However, I have an extensive existing code base. Very fast compiler, very small generated exe's, and very easy to work with. But, I don't see any progress in a 64-bit nor linux versions so I've switched to Python for such things.

discreteevent• 7 years ago

I had to use some python with vs code recently and for some reason it reminded me (in a good way) of working in qbasic with the little ide/debugger. The same kind of quick simplicity.

CarlGundel6• 7 years ago

Power BASIC is a great dialect. I believe you can still purchase it too. I wrote some industrial strength stuff with Power BASIC some time back.

ryanmercer• 7 years ago

Erm, sorta. Does Atari BASIC count?

vb6sp63• 7 years ago

vb6

gus_massa• 7 years ago

Me too, but it is getting harder and harder to install.

vb6sp63• 7 years ago

there is a 3rd party installer that works pretty good (vs6installer) and there are dedicated\active forums for vb

perl4ever• 7 years ago

VBA is still available in Office.

lovelearning• 7 years ago

I don't but my dad does. IBM BASICA interpreter from the 80s. I setup DosBox to run it on Linux.

bobochan• 7 years ago

I still write quite a few things in VBA. Most of this is for research or teaching purposes where I want to add a few things to Excel, but there is a surprising amount of demand from management consulting companies that want a front end or some sensitivity analysis added to a model that they have developed for a client.

ibejoeb• 7 years ago

I understand the arguments against BASIC, e.g., ingraining impractical paradigms, but I do wonder if I would have ever gotten so deep in without exposure to it. I doubt that I would have jumped directly into asm, c, or fortran as a child. Even Pascal was a major leap ahead and probably somewhat inapproachable without help.

Maybe that was only the case in the '70s and '80s. I'm sure that if I had Python as a kid, it would have been just as easy to experiment as it was with BASIC back then.

mschaef4• 7 years ago

I understand the arguments against BASIC, e.g., ingraining impractical paradigms,

The early interpreted BASICs did make it difficult to write good code. All source editing was line editing, every line was numbered, there weren't any structured control flow statements, composite data structures were limited to arrays and strings...

But even as early as the second half of the 80's there were mainstream implementations of BASIC that addressed all of these. Microsoft QuickBASIC 4 added a full screen editor and then completely relaxed the need for line numbering. Line numbers were still supported, but so were symbolic labels. QB4 also had support for functions/subroutines, decent control flow statements, and structured data types. There was also reasonable support for extension libraries, and the like. As long as you didn't rely on any code patterns that required any kind of callback or inversion of control, you could do a very nice job writing well factored and maintainable code.

smacktoward3• 7 years ago

The early interpreted BASICs did make it difficult to write good code. All source editing was line editing, every line was numbered, there weren't any structured control flow statements, composite data structures were limited to arrays and strings...

The sad part is that, because BASIC was supposed to be the "easy" programming language, it was frequently used as the language in which students were taught how to program. Which meant its bad habits ended up getting impressed hard onto a lot of impressionable minds. I spent years fixing all the ways first learning to program in BASIC had bent my brain.

Someone• 7 years ago

"The early interpreted BASICs did make it difficult to write good code. All source editing was line editing”

You have to see this in historical context. That Basic had an editor was a huge step forwards. That it wasn’t a full-screen editor was because full-screen editors didn’t exist yet (who wants to wait for their teletype to print 24 lines, and waste half a page of paper on it?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC#Origin:

"The first version BASIC language was released on 1 May 1964”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor#History:

"One of the earliest full-screen editors was O26, which was written for the operator console of the CDC 6000 series computers in 1967.”

kentbrew• 7 years ago

I did a ton of good work in QuickBASIC 4.5. Wrote some shareware games, one of which was converted to a successful commercial product. Plus lots of contracting in the 80s for people who needed data (send back and forth on floppies) converted from one accounting system to another.

jhbadger• 7 years ago

When traditional line-numbered BASIC was developed, those "impractical paradigms" were very practical, as FORTRAN had yet to get functions and its program flow was based on GOTOs as well. Structured Programming seems so obvious to us today that it was hard to understand that it had to be invented, just like object-orientation was later.

CarlGundel6• 7 years ago

In spite of its warts the line numbered BASIC interpreter has it's good features, especially the immediacy of the interactive interpreter. The beginning programmer benefits hugely from this. Many languages boast about having this today, but BASIC had it all along until a more edit/compile/debug style BASIC became the norm.

bsdimp• 7 years ago

The last actual BASIC I wrote was in 1985.

nighthawk24• 7 years ago

wow, the first line in BASIC I wrote was in 1995. (millennial here)

proxybop2• 7 years ago

I learned to code from some indie version of basic on the internet called Liberty BASIC when I was 13. I used it for years because the people on the forums were so nice and basically held my hand through learning a lot of basic computer science and exposed me to the history of computing via recreated qbasic programs and games, etc.

I’m super grateful for little things like that. All those older people that were welcoming to me on those forums have a special place in my heart, and I’ve been thinking about them fondly while I build a compiler—something I wouldn’t have been able to do without them answering all my questions when I got stuck.

zeko11952• 7 years ago

That is why I fell in love with programming. So many smart people willing to spend time and effort on explaining me simple things. I have tried to give back by tutoring people as much as I can. The technology community is amazing.

proxybop2• 7 years ago

It is wonderful. I really want to find a way to help teach kids/teenagers about programming. It can really make you feel good about yourself to build something and see it working

ksec2• 7 years ago

Not sure if that is still true today, most of them replies were RTFM.

I do miss the old Internet.

HEHENE• 7 years ago

Liberty BASIC (JustBASIC first, then later switched to Liberty) was how I got started in programming as well. The community was awesome and there were tons of examples out there to reference from.

Later I spent a lot of time writing IRC bots and the IRC communities were equally as friendly.

The real light bulb moment for me was a PHP tutorial from, I think, W3Schools. There was this moment where I realized I could build this thing and with a single click anyone in the world with a computer and internet connection could consume it. Everybody has a web browser! That was the moment I realized I wanted to to be a web developer and I never looked back.

dejv• 7 years ago

No, but I’ve jut seen kit of scientific gear (ADC module) that boasted about having examples in both fortran and basic to make integration easy.

julienfr112• 7 years ago

python is the new basic

musicale2• 7 years ago

Pretty much. Just like BASIC, Python is a gateway drug to all of computing.

BASIC was designed with a simple, algebraic syntax to enable non-experts to learn how to write simple programs in an afternoon, and Python seems to follow in that mold.

In fact, the following BASIC program runs fine in Python 2.7:

a = 2

b = 3

print "Hello, world! Let's do some math:"

print "a * b =", a * b

sdinsn• 7 years ago

Still? I never have

zeko11952• 7 years ago

Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. What a beauty.

timbit422• 7 years ago

That's a backronym if I ever saw one.

mattmoose21• 7 years ago

I wrote some on-printer programs in basic recently as it was the only thing the printers could run.

jonathanstrange• 7 years ago

I have an app for my own use written in Purebasic. I occasionally recompile it to keep it up to date.

linuxlizard• 7 years ago

Yes. The one called Python. No line numbers but a funny indentation system.

boobePhuu7iet7i• 7 years ago

wat

stergios• 7 years ago

A friend once told me "Python is the Visual Basic of the Internet". That still brings a smile to my face.

musicale2• 7 years ago

^ This. However I still take issue with Python 3's removal of the PRINT statement.

Phylter3• 7 years ago

You mean making it a function instead of a statement?

earthboundkid2• 7 years ago

No, and I don't miss it because I don't feel like was actually "simpler" than what I use today. Almost anything I could have done easily in BASIC in 1992, I can do more easily in Python now. The exception might be drawing ASCII graphic games, but I don't have any desire to make such games today, and if I did, I could just learn how to use TCell or whatever.

xtracto• 7 years ago

or PLAY "CDEFCCDEFCDEGDFG"

agent008t• 7 years ago

Is there an equivalent for Python?

dwculp2• 7 years ago

I agree, BASIC is a novelty and it holds a very special place in my heart. I first started programming in BASIC around 1979 and I used it to do so many things. In the mid-80's as a teenager I wrote my own BBS system on my C64 for it. I loved BASIC.

However, today there are far better languages that are easier and are better introductions to programming for beginners. Of those, Python is my favorite.

Phylter3• 7 years ago

Python today is what BASIC was in the 90's and earlier. Though, Python is obviously a lot more powerful but so are computers in general.

crtlaltdel• 7 years ago

The last thing I did in a BASIC dialect was VB.NET circa 2007-8 and was a service in a .NET webapp backend. At the time I was a EE with limited professional programming experience outside of small personal utilities. Like a lot of people I had first encountered BASIC with the Apple II in a school computer lab around 1995 and built some small text adventure games with it.

I echo the sentiment of proxybop; the ability to type things and see something happen is a powerful motivator in learning to code. As a lot of commenters point out, Python seems to have largely replaced BASIC as the "beginner" language to help teach folks. The REPL reinforces this, imo.

illegalsmile• 7 years ago

I don't call myself a programmer at all but all my environmental dataloggers are programmed using CRBasic so yes I still write code in some form of BASIC if that counts.

SyneRyder• 7 years ago

Sometimes. I use Xojo, the new name for REALbasic. It's a cross platform Basic compiler, that makes desktop apps for Windows, Mac & Linux (also iOS & Raspberry Pi). Sometimes it's the fastest way to prototype an idea - it works a lot like Visual Basic & Delphi did.

I've used it to make a business dashboard for my indie software business, a schedule estimating app using "evidence based" Monte Carlo methods, and I was working on a cross platform Micro.Blog client (inspired a lot by Tweetbot).

grendelt• 7 years ago

I'm a curriculum developer and lead teacher training workshops. We still teach BASIC because one of the robotics platforms still in existence is the BoeBot from Parallax. It uses the BASIC Stamp. When I started, the rest of the team was only doing the BoeBot. I started learning microcontrollers with the BASIC Stamp and I forgot how restricting it is when you try to do much with it. I proposed we adopt the Parallax Shield bot which uses an Arduino as the brain instead of the BASIC Stamp. Leadership agreed.

It's actually more difficult to teach Arduino in a day or two and hope any of it sticks if the person you're training in coming in with zero programming background. BASIC is still an easy language for complete newbie to pick up in a short amount of time. The ease of learning comes at a cost later on though. I've encouraged teachers to start with BASIC if their students had no prior background or if they themselves feel overwhelmed by the wider pastures of the Arduino. I underscore that the time spent learning C++ in an Arduino context is a better investment than time spent mastering BASIC. BASIC is easy to learn for the purposes of the robot, but C++ can control the robot and allow you to branch out into countless other languages. I liken programming languages to spoken languages and learning C++ is like learning Latin. It may be obtuse and difficult at first, but once it clicks, you can easily slide into any number of other languages with ease.

I'm now not really beating the BASIC drum anymore, instead I talk up Python now that Parallax has released a bot built atop the micro:bit. It's limited in the amount of memory on board and python eats embedded memory for lunch. It's time well spent learning Python. It allows students to grow into "what's next" far easier. Kids that learn Python on something like this robot can easily write the same kind of code on a computer to have it do all sorts of things. Kids in camps that I've run (and students in my classroom years ago) love learning about the countless python libraries they can use. I casually point out "mouse" and they making "random mouse movement" scripts as a gag. I always "fall for it" each time. ("Oh no! What?! My mouse... it's jumping all over the place!!!" - met with giggles, high fives, raucous laughter, etc)

So, yeah, I actually still teach BASIC on occasion, but I'm more and more turning teachers into Python lovers and C++ for the Arduino.

CarlGundel6• 7 years ago

I personally think that BASIC is an excellent first language, but people really should learn several different languages and be exposed to different programming ideas and styles. In addition to the Python and C++ you mentioned, people should consider Forth, Smalltalk, JavaScript, etc.

alexhutcheson• 7 years ago

A shocking amount of processes in the business world still depend on VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) running in Excel (and sometimes Access). It's actually a pretty nice RAD environment, as long as you're not going to scale beyond a team of one or two developers!

jshaqaw• 7 years ago

I am just starting to teach my young kids to code. I haven't found a better solution than old fashion BASIC for that stage when you graduate from Scratch but aren't ready to onboard lot of the complexity of a Python or Racket yet. I love Python and Racket but for an 8 year old they still have a lot of background baggage vs the immediacy of BASIC.

WorldMaker5• 7 years ago

Unfortunately I still have to do maintenance on ancient VB6 code. I'd rather not, and have been working to reimplement it in more modern environments, but you go to war with the budgets you have not the budgets you wish for.

smnplk• 7 years ago

qbasic 4.5

spalt• 7 years ago

We still do some development in .NET 3.5 VB (huge health care company). It rules and I love it. We do angular, node, c#, yadda yadda, also, but I will always return to my #1 (and first) love, BASIC.

DannyB2• 7 years ago

10 CODE IN BASIC

20 ???

30 GOSUB 10

40 PROFIT!

unwiredben• 7 years ago

The scripting language used for developing Roku channels is BrightScript, which is based on BASIC syntax with some bits of other languages thrown in.

russh• 7 years ago

Occasionally, in tiny basic running on an Arduino powered robot when teaching classes at our local Makerspace.

gourabmi• 7 years ago

The last time I used BASIC was in 2001. QBASIC was <3

saundby2• 7 years ago

Check out QB64: https://www.portal.qb64.org

chr• 7 years ago

Nah.

  (prog ()
   10 (print "hello") 
   20 (go 10))

ksec2• 7 years ago

I know there are still a lot of VB6 Apps in Small to Medium Business. And Visual FoxPro, which has a languages 99% similar to BASIC is still being used as well.

dwculp2• 7 years ago

Not really, I dont have any real need to. BASIC holds a special place in my heart as it is where I started in 1979....ish. However, I have very little reason to use it now. There are better and more powerful options today.

I teach kids to program via an after school robotics club and Python is so much easier and more powerful than BASIC ever was.

Occasionally I get nostalgic and break out a BASIC and its fun for a bit but I quickly realize how clunky the language really is.

Phylter3• 7 years ago

Does VB.NET count? I code in that all the time but only because my employer makes me.

I still break out the QBasic once in a while. I have it in DosBox for when I get the itch. In AppleWin I toy with Applesoft Basic. I also play a bit with QB64 which is a modern QBasic clone.

Normally I write code in C# or Python though. C# is my main language and it's what puts food on my table.

saundby2• 7 years ago

Yes.

XBASIC, QB64, and various BASICs specific to old computers I still use, like MBASIC on my Osborne 1.

zxdunny• 7 years ago

I've been writing a toy BASIC interpreter for about the past ten years: https://www.youtube.com/user/ZXSpin/videos

codingdave• 7 years ago

Not the BASIC with line numbers that you may be thinking of, but VBA in Microsoft Office apps is a descendant of Visual Basic, and is definitely still out there. I use it when writing scripts to parse content out of old Word docs.

ddgflorida• 7 years ago

No, but hard to beat Classic ASP for simple web apps. I wrote a BASIC interpreter with built-in SQL that was very useful for scripting.

zzo38computer• 7 years ago

I still use BASIC for writing DOS programs.

CarlGundel6• 7 years ago

I do code in BASIC a lot, but I admit to using my own compiler called Liberty BASIC so I am biased. I do see a lot of people complaining that BASIC isn't modern but this just isn't true today. There are many versions of BASIC and a lot of them do have modern structure and scoping and some even add object oriented features. Python isn't the new BASIC. BASIC is alive and well today.

sarossell• 7 years ago

Liberty BASIC. It's been around for nearly three decades, is very well documented, has excellent support, and is the closest you can get in modern times to the syntax of the original Dartmouth BASIC. So it easily appeals to the old-school crowd like me. But it also has over 300 commands or constants to keep up with modern operating systems and methods which allow for GUI design, event-driven applications, calling DLLs, playing media files, interacting with joysticks, displaying graphics, etc.

rodbird• 7 years ago

Yes, I use Liberty BASIC V4.5.1. I started programming for fun and relaxation when Sinclair Spectrums first appeared, then on to Commodore and Amstrad. Then it all died down a bit real work intervened and in the meantime BASICs got super complicated. My first reentry was to Visual BASIC uggg… Then I found Liberty, super easy BASIC control of Windows.

klondike_klive• 7 years ago

I seem to remember that my ZX81 Basic allowed a computed "goto" statement, which my later Amstrad BASIC didn't. I mostly used it for type-ins from magazines. I also had a little dabble in machine code (nearly forty years later I still remember the opcode for Return is "C9") but the learning curve was too steep for me to do anything much. I still wonder whether given tutelage or encouragement in programming I could have got way more out of my computer as a child.

timbit422• 7 years ago

Very few BASICs had that. Atari BASIC and the Simons' BASIC add-on for C64 BASIC (CGOTO) both had it.

WaltPurvis• 7 years ago

I code in BASIC all day, every day, developing an application with Xojo. (https://www.xojo.com/)

It has some issues, but it's still probably the best possible tool for making cross-platform desktop applications.

I really enjoy the expressive power and/or other features of Swift, Go, and a few other languages, but if I could write code in only one language it would be an object-oriented BASIC like Xojo.

CarlGundel6• 7 years ago

Thirty+ years ago BASIC became a modern structured programming language, but so many people seem ignorant of this.

CarlGundel6• 7 years ago

Another point worth making is that there is no right or wrong language in many cases. If you enjoy programming in BASIC, or C, or SNOBOL, or bash, or Python, go knock yourself out. There's really no good excuse for language snobbery.

If you need to program in a particular language at your place of work, or you want to learn a language to compete for a job then that's a different matter. ;-)

Nzen• 7 years ago

I work at a company that makes a niche ERP. The owner wrote the original in Basis International's BBX. Within the last ten years, the company ported the ERP to Java. But, we still use it as a code generator for our dao layer and half the views. Quarterly, I'll go in there to change the templates to improve our dao.

It gets the job done. Part of my reticence is ignorance. I might have a meaningful opinion if I were familiar with more than just println and single line if/else. I am glad I don't need to plan for line numbering in any other realm.

Ask HN: Do you still code in BASIC?

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